Ten Ways to Spend Less on Marketing

Because marketing is a creative activity you can always find new and better ways to make an effective impact and attract sales, even on a small budget. Here are some ideas that help you to maximise your impact while minimising your budget.

Make your communications more visually striking by including images of people and using creative, dynamic layouts. This visual style gets more reader attention than any letter, brochure, or ad you put out there, making it more effective and efficient for you.

Improve the appearance of your logo. Most logos are boring, but great companies always have great logos. Wonder which came first?

Buy visibility on the Google and Yahoo! search engines. This is inexpensive enough to work for local as well as global markets.

Release a survey or host an interesting event to generate publicity.

Send out a press release to your local media once every quarter or whenever you have valuable news to release, updating them on events in your business. Getting local news coverage isn’t that hard, and it often attracts new business.

Find something simple and inexpensive to offer along with your most popular product or service in order to pick up add-on sales.

Give out coupons to encourage prospects to try your product or service, so that its qualities become obvious to them. Don’t, however, give away price-cutting coupons or discounts for no good reason – think of other ways to increase your sales appeal.

Offer (or improve) a guarantee, one with no small print. If you have a good product or service, stand behind it!

Vow never to lose a customer. Whenever you have a customer who’s upset or at risk, find out why and win them back.

Discover where you lose the most prospects or potential customers and then concentrate your marketing at this point to convert more of them into customers.